Mixed-architecture process scheduling on tightly coupled reconfigurable computers

Abstract

The design and implementation of a multitasking runtime system for mixed-architecture applications on a tightly coupled FPGA-CPU platform is presented. The runtime environment and the user applications assume an underlying machine that encompasses multiple computing architectures within a unified machine model. Using this model, a unified process scheduling mechanism was developed that enables concurrent execution of multiple mixed-architecture processes. Scheduling and allocation strategies, including blocking and preemption, were implemented and evaluated with respect to performance and fairness on a Xilinx Zynq platform using a mix of synthetic workloads.